Volume 47 - Issue 4

AMERICAN SPIRIT — A d i v ided Connec t ic ut t ribe f i g h t s f or f edera l rec ognit ion —

ON THE HOUSATONIC

staff publisher Briton Park editors-in-chief Eric Boodman Julia Calagiovanni executive editor Ike Swetlitz managing editor Maya Averbuch senior editors Ashley Dalton Emily Efland Katy Osborn Noah Remnick Ezra Ritchin A. Grace Steig associate editors Caroline Sydney Isabelle Taft copy editor Douglas Plume photo editor Stephanie Wisowaty design editors Annie Schweikert Edward Wang Madeleine Witt

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

illustrator Madeleine Witt

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2014 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $50. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

Volume 48 Issue 4 March 2015

FEATURES

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www.thenewjournalatyale.com

American Spirit on the Housatonic What does it take for a Native American tribe to be acknowledged by the U.S. government?

by Maya Averbuch

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Everyday Evil Can a new network of radical vegans change the mainstream liberal agenda?

by Eric Boodman

STANDARDS

4 28

points of departure by various authors

snapshot The Yarn Bombers

by Ariel Katz

31

profile Investing in Writers

by Grace Hirshorn

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endnote Fun in the Time of Tolerance

by Austin Bryniarski

Cover by Edward Wang, Madeleine Witt, and Annie Schweikert

MARCH 2015

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points of departure

NO BO D Y ’ S H O M E In rural Connecticut, a ghost town’s Victorian houses begin to crumble

by Ruby Bilger

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ne plowed road cuts through the center of Johnsonville, Connecticut, and snow is piled high on either side. Beyond the road’s ragged edges, about twenty Victorian houses stand empty. They’re scattered in this plot of land as if airdropped, randomly spaced and facing different directions, like pigeons that landed in a snow bank. The paint on their walls is chipped and fading, save for a few remaining patches of jaunty red or turquoise. Some of their windows are broken but many are intact. One has a suitcase wedged into its frame. There are security cameras on every door.

For many months, this village was for sale. It was on the market from spring 2013 until late last October, when all sixty-two acres of it went up for auction at the starting price of $800,000. Considering it is part of the town of East Haddam, where single-family dwellings that are not historic Victorian homesteads 4

regularly sell for over $300,000, this asking price was almost desperately low. The auction closed on Halloween and the property sold for $1.9 million to an undisclosed buyer.

Johnsonville’s glory days have come and gone, a few times. From around 1850 to 1930 it was a prosperous milling community on the Moodus River. It was home to the Neptune Twine and Cord Company, owned by the village’s namesake, Emory Johnson. It was never much more than a company town—the mill, the mill office, the mill owner’s homestead, and a few workers’ cottages—but it did well enough.

Johnson had the money to carve nice Victorian details into his wraparound porch. The century moved on, though, and as local manufacturing faded, the town went into decline.

Then, in the 1960s, local aerospace millionaire THE NEW JOURNAL

Raymond Schmitt acquired the town piece by piece— looking security cameras, wading through a foot of starting with the mill—and turned Johnsonville into snow to approach the buildings. It was sweet and a a Victorian-themed tourist attraction. He brought in little sad to look at the loopy footprints we left around period-appropriate structures from other Connecticut them, signatures in the snow, like some indiscreet trestowns, including a chapel, a stable, and a steamboat. passers had signed the guest book of the abandoned He refurbished all the buildings and stuffed them village. Looking in the windows, we saw the typical with antiques. relics of incomplete decay—some mossy books, piles “That was the town’s real heyday,” says Luke of wallpaper, woodchips, dented beer cans. Pity all the Boyd, the creator of a website dedicated to Johnson- antiques had been auctioned off. Outside, it was damp ville. But it didn’t last. “East Haddam hated him. Here and quiet, save for the occasional car sputtering by. comes this carpetbagger guy, rich off the military-in- And there was always the muted thudding of the river dustrial complex, and he’s trying to bring tourists into dam behind the homestead. this village.”

The boom-bust cycle isn’t anything new for small Schmitt got into a zoning dispute with the town communities reliant on a single local industry. But and closed the attraction in 1990. He died in 1998, Johnsonville, which seemed to die a natural death and the hotel management company, MJ ABC, bought when the mill closed, was resurrected unnaturally— the property in 2001. They tried to turn it into a a Frankenstein patched together with other villages’ 55-and-over community with a health club and spa buildings. With the mill gone, its survival can only retreat before the 2008 depend on tourism: the recession foiled their way it looks, and the fact NOW IT’S A GHOST TOWN, plans. Now it’s a ghost that it’s there. And for town, though it has alnow it seems it will be THOUGH IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN ways been a town in there until it crumbles A TOWN IN SUSPENSION— suspension—inhabited completely. According to and declining, alive but the real estate agency that INHABITED AND DECLINING, only on display, owned handles the property, the ALIVE BUT ONLY ON DISPLAY, and unoccupied, sold undisclosed buyer has and abandoned. backed out.

OWNED AND UNOCCUPIED, During a blizzarding There’s a neatly symSOLD AND ABANDONED. Saturday afternoon, two bolic picture of Johnsonfriends and I drove up to ville that’s easy to find on Johnsonville. The village came into view as we drove the Internet. It’s of a short, weather-worn gate bearing down Johnsonville Road. First came the Old Gilead a sign that says “Village Closed to Public.” We found Chapel, the small Victorian church that Raymond this sign in front of a small cottage facing the road.

Schmitt bought from the town of Waterford, Connect- Approaching the house, I noticed a Christmas tree icut, meticulously disassembled, transported to John- through one of the windows, draped in illuminated sonville, and put back together. Its door shone bright white lights. Closer still, I saw that the inside of the blue. Then there was the Emory Johnson Homestead, house was fully furnished, with a runner on the taits ornamented porch now peeling and neglected. ble and little doilies on the armchairs. We even heard Signs on doors and windows of every building around music wafting from the back. Excited, we knocked warned “NO TRESPASSING” and “PRIVATE PROPER- on the front door, and when no one answered, we TY.” But there was no graffiti, and the doors hadn’t tapped on all of the windows. We walked all around been kicked in. Some light bulbs were on in front of the perimeter of the house, trying to catch a glimpse the stable, a flickering reminder that anarchy doesn’t of someone. Vandal deterrent, caretaker’s secret home, rule yet in Johnsonville. Boyd says there’s a caretaker domestic ghost residence—it’s not disclosed. No one who comes by from time to time, but he doesn’t live in in the empty village came to tell us. on the site.

We parked in an empty lot and walked around.

Ruby Bilger is a freshman We threw up our hoods and tried to avoid the ancientin Branford College.

MARCH 2015

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IT ’S SHO W T I M E !

New Haven revives a historic music hall

by Nate Steinberg

“T

his is our comeback,” said Andy Wolf. It was January 14, 2015, and the College Street Music Hall had big news to share. The theatre, after being shut down for thirteen years, announced plans to reopen in May. Formerly known as the Palace, and then as the Roger Sherman, it had shut down in 2002 after nearly eighty years at the center of New Haven’s cultural scene. Even though it passed almost immediately into the hands of the New Haven Center for the Performing Arts, it has remained vacant since then. Now, recent changes in the small nonprofit’s leadership have sparked an effort to bring the property back to life.

For Wolf, director of New Haven’s Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism, this is about more than an old property regaining functionality. It’s about revitalizing downtown through the performing arts. And although it isn’t technically the city’s project—the funding has come from a private company—the idea behind it came from City Hall.

Both Wolf and Mayor Toni Harp envision a complete transformation of College Street. Instead of just a few blocks with restaurants and theatres, City Hall wants to create a scaled-down Times Square, complete with neon marquees and throngs of pedestrians. The comparison with New York is not accidental. In recent years, musical acts have skipped over New Haven, moving straight from the Big Apple to Boston or Providence. Wolf wants those 6

groups to stop at the College Street Music Hall. “Soon, New Haven’s going to be the sixth borough,” he said.

To most, the idea that New Haven could sparkle like Times Square seems far-fetched. But when the venue opened as the Palace Theatre in 1924, New Haven was a major stop in the American performing arts scene. Everyone from Marlon Brando to the Marx Brothers passed through. For much of the twentieth century, the musicals and vaudeville shows performed at the Palace Theater made it a cornerstone of New Haven’s cultural life.

And with the Schubert Theatre just across the street, the image of College Street as a mini theater district wasn’t so far off the mark.

New Haven real estate mogul Joel Schiavone, whose company owned the Palace Theatre, renovated its façade and lobby in 1984. But when the company went bankrupt in the early 2000s, the Palace shut down. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation then acquired the building and stipulated that a nonprofit organization become the next owner. That organization was the NHCPA. The only problem was that the NHCPA did not have the funds to reopen the theatre. Consequentially, the theatre languished. Then, in 2014, with a new mayor for the first time in twenty years, the city approached commercial real estate investor Keith Mahler to start working on the project.

The impetus came partly from Matthew Nemerson, THE NEW JOURNAL

New Haven’s director of economic development. “Our first question when something is empty is: ‘What are the steps necessary for getting it back to life?’” he said.

Mahler, who also works as a concert promoter, convinced Elissa Getto to move to New Haven from Stamford to direct the NHCPA. The nonprofit’s director since last May, she has experience at the helm of struggling arts organizations: her previous position had been at the Stamford Center for Performing Arts, which she had helped rescue from bankruptcy.

The city chose not to allot any funds for the project.

Instead, Mahler made a significant private investment and will be the theatre’s promoter. He is working with the NHCPA to run the project.

“It is unusual for theatres to undergo drastic change without city or state funding,” said Getto, but her team is determined to pull it off by taking a new approach. “Just because we are a nonprofit doesn’t mean we don’t act like a business,” she explains. The College Street Music Hall project is part of a new trend in of urban development: collaboration between nonprofit organizations and private companies. Aside from the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, the College Street Music Hall is the only regional concert venue developed in this kind of partnership.

With 2,000 seats, the College Street Music Hall is already attracting the talent it needs. On May 1, The Machine will perform the music of Pink Floyd along with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. A ten-day film festival is in the works, as is a “Count Up to 400” extravaganza—the first annual celebration anticipating the city’s four-hundredth birthday in 2038, which will include a number of concerts.

The hope is that the shows that are planned for the College Street Music Hall will attract Elm City locals, suburbanites, and students from the University of New Haven, Yale, and Gateway Community College. With plans underway to find a replacement for the recently closed Anchor Bar, and a renovation scheduled for the Schubert, College Street is decidedly in the midst of a makeover, even if the comparison to Times Square might seem ambitious.

“Ever since the original nine-square grid, New Haven has been a city designed for culture,” said Wolf. If you ask him if the new College Street is focused on restoring faded glory, he will correct you: “Not restoring history, reimagining history.”

Nate Steinberg is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College.

paint the streets New Haven finds simple solutions to unfriendly roads

by Jillian Kravatz

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n the morning of Sunday, May 1, 2011, residents of the Audubon district awoke to find a bold new crosswalk at the intersection of Whitney Avenue and Audubon Street. Spray-painted and slightly crooked, the rogue act made headlines around town. Opinions differed—officials said the sight lines weren’t clear enough for a crosswalk, business owners liked that it made it easier for people to get to their stores, and some just thought it looked a little funny. Useful or not, the crosswalk was illegal and officials had the MARCH 2015

paint removed two days later. The impromptu markings made a point, however: the intersection was dangerous. The city needed to rethink its streets.

Following the deaths of two young pedestrians in New Haven in the spring of 2008, residents, elected officials, and local organizations established the Safe Streets Coalition. The group was formed to advocate for streets that are “livable, walkable, bikeable, economically viable, environmentally sound, and safe for residents of all ages and abilities,” according to 7

its website. The coalition launched the Connecticut Livable Streets Campaign, which began to lobby for local and statewide “complete streets” legislation. By July 2009, the legislation, which encourages engineers to implement “traffic calming measures” and make “walkability” a priority, had passed in both New Haven and the state capital. That year, an education campaign called “Street Smarts” launched, informing Connecticut residents about the safe use of streets.

It included advice on how to be visible to drivers at night and cautioned against dangerous behavior like jaywalking. A year later, a small group of New Haven engineers created a design manual to help other cities comply with “complete streets” policies. (The state has committed to finishing its own manual by 2017.)

Still, according to the 2012 DataHaven Community Wellbeing Survey, forty-one percent of New Haven residents say that their neighborhood is unsafe for bicycling, and nineteen percent say that there are no safe sidewalks or crosswalks.

In response to these safety concerns, a new kind of urban planning—the “complete streets” movement— is underway in New Haven and across the country. The idea behind complete streets is simple: roads should be built for their users. All of their users, not just driv8

ers. It’s particularly important in a compact urban community like New Haven. Mark Abraham, executive director of DataHaven, reports that nearly thirteen percent of workers, around 7,500 residents, say they walk to work every day. Roughly three percent, or 1,500 workers, make their daily commute by bicycle.

Yet most streets are only designed with the needs of drivers in mind, because, despite the new 2009 legislation, state laws generally require that roads maximize the efficiency of auto traffic. Until recently, the Connecticut Department of Transportation was called the Connecticut Department of Highways, and many advocates still find that it overemphasizes the role of automobiles in transportation.

“You should be designing for the street you want.

That’s not how most engineering is done,” said Doug Hausladen, New Haven’s current director of transportation, traffic, and parking. When Hausladen was appointed to the position in 2013, he realized that the number of complete streets project proposals submitted far outpaced his office’s ability to carry them out. The proposals, which detail community members’ concerns and their proposed solutions, reflect the desire for improved streets throughout New Haven. But Hausladen could only implement about one THE NEW JOURNAL

project per year, given budget and time constraints.

One of the first of these projects was a new crosswalk across Whitney at the site of the rogue crosswalk.

Now, the site is decked out with pedestrian-activated LED lights that flash to alert drivers when a pedestrian is crossing. Curb extensions at the crosswalk shorten the width of the street by sixteen feet to make crossing easier for pedestrians, and a speed table—like an extended speed bump—forces drivers to slow down as they approach the crosswalk. Because of the intersection’s layout, the project was complex and costly. It took nearly a year, and required a $150,000 subsidy from Yale. Its total cost was approximately $320,000.

But the city doesn’t have enough money to spend over a quarter-million dollars per intersection.

Now, three years after the spray paint was scrubbed from Whitney Avenue, Hausladen and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn have a more cost-effective plan for rethinking the streets of New Haven. It’s called “Complete Streets 2.0,” and it aims to find solutions that are inexpensive and easy to implement—solutions that actually look a lot more like the spray-painted crosswalk than the high-tech system of strobe lights and other modifications that exists there today.

“This is Mayor Harp and all the complete streets activists finally realizing the promise that we made in the 2009 legislation,” Hausladen said. The first Complete Streets 2.0 project—a re-design of Edgewood Avenue—was announced in November. It is set to reach completion in May 2015 at a cost of only $80,000.

The design reengineers a 2.1-mile stretch of Edgewood to accommodate not only automobile traffic, but also bicyclists and pedestrians. “We are not afraid to rethink the entire space of the roadway,” Hausladen said. “Every inch of the roadway is valuable, and we can find a way to use it effectively and safely.”

By using inexpensive materials like paint, delineator tubes, and traffic bollards, Complete Streets 2.0 aims to increase the number of completed projects to at least ten per year, giving community members the results they want more quickly. “Granite curb costs me forty dollars a foot to install,” explained City Engineer Giovanni Zinn. “A six-inch white line only costs me forty cents a foot. I can replace that line many, many times before it even gets close to costing what a curb would, and we can keep tweaking it until we find the best solution,” he added. Complete Streets 2.0 is unique in its ability to implement projects quickly and allow them to “fail fast” if they are ineffective.

MARCH 2015

“It leaves room for mistakes, because none of us have all of the answers,” said Liam Brennan, a community activist and a member of Elm City Cycling, a local advocacy group.

But the proposed changes can seem dubious to those unfamiliar with the complete streets philosophy. “People understand the low-dollar stuff, but they are still a little nervous about me removing a travel lane,” Hausladen said, referring to the plans for Edgewood Avenue, which will convert a traffic lane into a bike lane. “Some of the logic can be counterintuitive,” Brenan said. “People might think that wider streets means safer streets because no one has explained the studies that show that a narrower street causes cars to drive slower, which ends up being a safer environment overall.” And by making it easier for people to walk and bicycle, complete streets provide alternatives to driving a car, therefore reducing pollution.

Educating the community about complete streets is an ongoing challenge for Hausladen and his team.

Hausladen has a far-reaching idea of what these streets can do. According to him, complete streets are the right move, not merely because they make cities safer and reduce their environmental impact, but because complete streets help create a city that is simply a better place to live—a vibrant city filled with ideas, activities, and thriving businesses. “Community needs more humans interacting day to day. Good ideas come from conversations,” Hausladen said, explaining that people do not have those opportunities for interaction in a “carbon community” where everyone is commuting in individual cars, cut off from one another.

Advances in car technology make it increasingly easy to travel by vehicle, but the ease comes at a price of busier streets and more disconnected city life. It turns out the amateur urban planners on Whitney Avenue were onto something: sometimes the solution to congested streets and dangerous crosswalks can be as simple as some white paint. Local voices are calling out for better design, but the state’s policies lag behind. Still, Hausladen finds the recent improvements to New Haven’s streets encouraging.

“No matter how much amazing transportation we have in the future,” he said, “people are still going to want to have a more pleasant experience crossing the street.”

Jillian Kravatz is a sophomore in Branford College.

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The Schaghticoke tribe is praying for the long-lost bones of its ancestors. Standing on the Connecticut reservation their families once called home, members clasp one another’s cold hands. They turn their backs on the neighboring town of Kent and on the massive vans parked like sleeping giants on the other end of the plateau. They wait outside the wooden fence of the reservation’s small cemetery, bordered by spindly birch trees and the Housatonic River. It is early November, and they have gathered from across the state to clear away the autumn’s fallen leaves and to pay their respects to the departed.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

AMERICAN SPIRIT ON THE HOUSATONIC A CONNECTICUT TRIBE SEEKS LAND, RIGHTS, AND UNITY

BY M AYA AV E R B U C H P H OTO S BY M AYA AV E R B U C H & E DWA R D CO L U M B I A

“We are putting our ancestors back in the ground, where they should be, and back on the reservation,” says Ed Sarabia, a member of another Native American tribe who has come to officiate the ceremony. Dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, he crosses the circle to pick up a can of American Spirit tobacco and a blue, gunshaped lighter. He tells those present to forget about their unfinished work and their unpaid bills for the moment. As part of the purification ritual, called a “smudge,” he raises a flame to a braid of dried sweet grass and recites a blessing. Two other tribal memMARCH 2015

bers make their way around the circle in silence, tracing a ring around each participant with the burning braid. It dips from head to shins, and then rises again, smoking faintly.

As they enter the cemetery, each participant pinches tobacco from the large can and scatters it in the freshly dug hole in the corner of the burial ground. Beside it sits a shallow, white box filled with bones. Nick Bellantoni, the former state archaeologist who brought the bones to the reservation today, declares that they are, without a doubt, of Native Ameri11

can origin. Several years ago, archeologists unearthed the seventeenth-century bone fragments in Fort Hill, outside of New Milford. Though the bones may have come from one of the related tribes that lived in the area centuries ago, Sarabia takes the opportunity to focus on the spiritual Creator. It is a time to celebrate commonality, rather than difference.

For the Schaghticoke, returning to the land is a fraught subject, and proving ancestry is even more contentious. Though Connecticut has recognized their tribe since 1736, they have spent the last few decades trying to get the U.S. Department of the Interior to make the same determination. Joining the roster of 566 federally acknowledged tribes would come with far-ranging benefits. It would give the tribe the status of a sovereign nation, and guarantee its members funding and services for education, healthcare, housing, law enforcement, and resource protection through the DOI’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. It would also help the Schaghticoke reclaim much of their reservation land. According to the tribe, the approximately 2,500-acre reservation has shrunk to four hundred acres, since state-appointed overseers sold off much of the land to cover Schaghticoke debts. But the land claims stand little chance in court without federal recognition.

In order to gain United States’ stamp of approval, the tribe must demonstrate that it has been a distinct community governed by a political authority since what the Bureau of Indian Affairs calls “historic times,” starting as early as 1789. Despite the work

DESPITE THE WORK OF RESEARCHERS, ANTHROPOLOGISTS, GENEALOGISTS, AND ATTORNEYS, CORROBORATING THE TRIBE’S CONTINUOUS EXISTENCE HAS BEEN A COSTLY, DECADESLONG PROCESS. 12

of researchers, anthropologists, genealogists, and attorneys, corroborating the tribe’s continuous existence has been a costly, decades-long process. The tribe’s massive collection of court files, meeting records, land sales, marriage certificates, and other documentation has helped it almost reach its goal, but according to the DOI, significant gaps remain in the historical record.

For a brief, promising moment in 2004, the U.S. government granted the Schaghticoke the coveted federal status. The seemingly endless process the tribe started when it filed a letter of intent to the BIA in 1981 had finally come to a close. But Connecticut politicians, led by then-Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, placed their support behind the town of Kent and other landowners around the reservation who were opposed to the tribe earning federal recognition. Connecticut, the affluent Kent School, the local power utility, and a dozen towns and cities requested that the DOI reconsider the evidence. By 2005, the department issued a Reconsidered Final Determination. The Schaghticoke became one of the only tribes in history to be stripped of its federal status through an overturned decision.

“That’s the oddity of being native,” says Sarabia, the spiritual leader, after the ceremony. “Why do we have to prove who we are in our own country?”

M

ost people have left the reservation, and the tribe has splintered, preventing it from showing a unified front. The two groups—the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation (STN) and the smaller Schaghticoke Indian Tribe (SIT)—are engaged in a bitter dispute over leadership. But the fight for recognition continues.

The STN, which lost its federal status in 2005, has renewed hopes: in 2013, the DOI proposed making the acknowledgement requirements far less stringent.

The SIT—which pushed the DOI to reconsider its approval of the STN—aims to complete its own petition for recognition. But a previously rejected tribe has little chance of emerging victorious, even if its two halves agree that they deserve more than just a rocky patch wedged between the state border and a town that doesn’t want them. As the opposing Schaghticoke chiefs challenge each other’s legitimacy, they play into the hands of lawmakers who say their community has fallen apart.

THE NEW JOURNAL

Ruth Garby Torres, a Schaghticoke historian, says that the tribe is partly responsible for its current condition. She critiques both tribal groups for foregoing reconciliation. “We’ve been victimized by a process, but there’s blame to be shared within the tribe,” she says. “There’s failure, or an inability, or both, to figure out how to move forward and still disagree.”

The office of Richard Velky, chief of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, is packed with the paper trail of more than a quarter century of legal battles. Tall black file cabinets sit next to shelves filled with fat binders. A dream catcher with a decorative snake coiled around it hangs on the wall. Towers of cardboard boxes with scrawled red labels lean against one another between the plastic potted pants. In the largest room of the Derby office, the curtains are drawn and the ceiling is unfinished, giving it the air of a forgotten attic. As I glance at Velky’s desk, I find a glossy flyer for the California Gaming Summit next to a Coca-Cola bottle and a mug with a Native American wearing a headdress.

“Inside these walls here, we have over 45,000 pages to prove our heritage,” says Velky, a portly man with receding white hair. He points to a stack of giant Rubbermaid tubs, one of an estimated hundred in the office. The BIA’s regulations have forced tribal members to become hyper-specific about their heritage, so the tribal office has started to look like the home of a hoarder. Velky calmly describes the countless letters he has written and reports he has filed. Only on occasion does he slip into the tone of a boxer who has taken a few too many punches.

The current process of tribal recognition was created in 1978; prior to that, groups were declared tribes by acts of Congress. However, the process is notoriously slow, as both the tribes and the BIA are often disorganized. The Schaghticoke filed a letter of intent to petition in 1981, but they didn’t complete their petition for another thirteen years. They lagged behind two other Connecticut tribes, the Mohegans and the Mashantucket PequWWots, who each opened their own enormous casinos after winning federal recognition. Until two years ago, the Foxwood Resort Casino, owned by the Pequot, was the largest casino in the U.S. Casinos, with their glitzy, seedy vibe, are glorified in Vegas movies and vilified in debates about moral towns. They complicate the BIA’s already convoluted processes. In 1988, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, granting tribes special gaming MARCH 2015

rights. The number of petitions skyrocketed as tribes seized the opportunity for economic growth. In Connecticut, federally recognized tribes are the only groups permitted to own casinos, and Velky considers the state government’s fear of additional casinos to be the primary cause of its opposition to the Schaghticoke. He insists that he is not pressing for recognition exclusively because of gaming rights, but he would consider opening a casino outside of the current reservation land.

“THAT’S THE ODDITY OF BEING NATIVE,” SAYS SARABIA, THE SPIRITUAL LEADER, AFTER THE CEREMONY. “WHY DO WE HAVE TO PROVE WHO WE ARE IN OUR OWN COUNTRY?” Yet casinos attract more than tourists. Steven Austin, who worked as an anthropologist for the STN, spelled out the politicians’ fears. “The casinos bring in corruption, problems with prostitution and drugs, and other evils,” he says. The state’s concerns extend beyond gaming, to tribes’ potentially far-reaching land claims, and their exemption from state and local property regulations. Though a quarter out of every dollar played at the Mohegan Sun or Foxwoods Resort Casino, excluding gamblers’ final winnings, goes to the state in lieu of taxes, the economic calculation doesn’t necessarily work out in the state’s favor. Tribal recognition confers the right to additional expensive social services. It also makes cuts into the state’s tax base.

But the grounds for the Reconsidered Final Determination have to do with something far more technical: historical gaps in the tribe’s extensive documentation. According to Velky, the problem arises from the fact that community leaders kept poor records in both the 1800s and 1900s. The fact that a state reservation existed bolstered the Schaghticoke’s original case, but Connecticut politicians protested against using state recognition as a marker of community, leading to the DOI’s painful revision.

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Velky still remembers camping on the reservation with other tribal members to tend a spiritual fire in the two weeks before the DOI’s 2005 decision. It was Columbus Day when they received news of the Reconsidered Final Determination, which invalidated their federal status. Finality had come and gone, and a torrential rain started to fall. “That was our ancestors talking aloud, saying that they were upset,” he says.

Research and litigation have cost the tribe an estimated $20 million, much of which came from Subway founder Frederick A. DeLuca, who may have expected a cut of eventual casino profits. “The only way we can pay investors back is through gaming,” Velky explains. (The Director of Corporate Communications for Subway said DeLuca was unable to comment).

DeLuca cut off his financial support after the tribe lost its recognition, so Velky is left to collect money from other private investors, hoping they can stretch funds far enough. Even now that the research process is complete, he must pay a few hundred dollars each month to keep his office, located above a hair salon and a chiropractor, with a view overlooking a parking lot.

The chief insists that where he really belongs is on the reservation: “If you go out this way, you see the first house. My grandfather was born in that house in 1903,” Velky explains on the day of the ceremony, gesturing at a boarded-up brown house with whitetrimmed windows. The government made it difficult to for tribal members to return after they first moved away. According to Velky, overseers from the state welfare department denied his grandfather permission to return to the land in the 1950s. In the 1960s, he says, Kent firemen used some of the tribal houses for training drills, igniting some of the recently abandoned homes and preventing them from being passed on to younger generations of Schaghticoke.

The tribe has become increasingly diffuse far from the land. Prior to a wedding in 2011, it had been 114 years since there had been a marriage between two Schaghticoke members. But over a decade ago, when Velky last surveyed the Schaghticoke, eighty families said they would return to the land if given the change. He believes they the rest, like him, have held onto that dream.

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e enter an adjoining room in the office, where a walking stick adorned with antlers and pheasant feathers lies nestled behind a large paper shredder. The abandoned fax machine and black-and-white images of traditionally dressed Native Americans are a reminder of what the recognition process has become. It is a fierce assertion of identity that relies upon endless clerical work. Yet Velky is determined to carry on. “Our people have been in every war for the people that are in the United States,” he tells me with pride and a hint of rancor. “We have fought diligently for our people and our rights, and we have been neglected.”

Alan Russell, the leader of SIT, is the tribal member who knows best what it means to call the land home. He is one of a handful of Schaghticoke who still live on the reservation. His newly rebuilt house sits up the road from the clearing where Velky’s people park their cars during the annual fall cleanup, which he does not attend. Velky and Russell do not speak to one another. Both claim to be the properly elected Schaghticoke chief; both claim that the other has essentially forged the names on his membership rolls to make them look more legitimate.

When I meet Russell on his property in November, behind the sign “BEWARE OF DOG,” he alleges that Velky is a fraud, one who has forced himself into the role of chief, and who has made headlines only because of his shady financial supporters. Russell, in the meantime, is still trying to muster up the money required to complete his petition for federal recognition. According to Bill Buchanan, a construction worker who has been the SIT’s primary consultant over the past decade, the petition will be completed this year. He himself is not Schaghticoke—he has no Native American heritage whatsoever—but he strangely points out that he is a relative of William Boyd, the actor who played the famed cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. “It’s kind of a modern-day cowboyand-Indian event,” he adds, as though he could revise America’s history by stepping into the spurred boots of a cowboy hero.

The 67-year-old Russell leans on a rake as he tells me his goals are more modest than Velky’s. A trading post, medical benefits, and educational scholarships would be nice for his people. But the real reason he is considering filing for federal recognition is because he fears that Velky would attempt to throw him off the land. “If he ever tried that, he’d be a dead man,” RusTHE NEW JOURNAL

sell says. Though his family lived in New Haven for a few years after Russell’s father enlisted in World War II, they moved back to the land when Russell was only four years old. There is a video, he tells me, of him taking his first footsteps next to the wooden sign that says “Schaghticoke Indian Reservation.”

The Schaghticoke, like the officials who have combed through their family records, are mired in a genealogical argument, as they note and scrutinize every happy marriage and every sour divorce. Russell states that he and Velky are distant cousins—they share a white great-grandmother—but Russell is descended from her first marriage, with Schaghticoke Jim-Pan Harris, while “Velky is the product of a white man.” Though the BIA ruled that Velky has provided adequate proof of his ancestry, the SIT will not relent.

Buchanan claims that, earlier this year, Velky’s nephew submitted his saliva to ancestry.com to find out if he is Native American. It was Buchanan’s suggestion that he use the genealogy site, but the relative never sent him the results.

Both parties accuse each other of foul play. Velky suspects that Russell burned down the central pavilion on the reservation and pulled out the crosses from Velky’s relatives’ graves. Russell claims that Velky harassed Russell’s dying mother and threatened his wife with a knife. “They play dirty, you know what I’m saying?” Russell asks me. I struggle to reconcile his claims with my memory of the man who offered me a warm handshake just a few hours before, and whose grandkids played games by the campfire.

STN membership remains at around 300 while SIT’s formal membership hovers closer to 125. Buchanan, Russell’s consultant, insists that Velky copied the names of SIT members onto the STN’s membership list and pretended that there had been some sort of reconciliation between the two groups to get federal recognition. What the Reconsidered Final Determination actually says is that there were a significant number of people who declined to enroll in the STN, which means that the STN is not representative of the entire Schaghticoke community. The document indi-

A TRIBAL MEMBER HOLDS THE CEREMONIAL SWEETGRASS AS OITHERS FILL IN A GRAVE.

MARCH 2015

15

cates that an SIT petition will be considered when it is submitted.

Buchanan states that Russell has 4,000 documents in his house that could address the gaps in the STN’s records. It’s a dubious claim, given that SIT lacked the millions their opponents spent to unearth all of the relevant paperwork, but he could be right, if tribal members withheld their personal records until now.

Until the petition is complete, it remains to be seen what the BIA will say. “When we get approved, all hell’s going to break through,” Buchanan says, without a doubt that the SIT will succeed.

BUT THE REAL REASON HE IS CONSIDERING FILING FOR FEDERAL RECOGNITION IS BECAUSE HE FEARS THAT VELKY WOULD ATTEMPT TO THROW HIM OFF THE LAND. “IF HE EVER TRIED THAT, HE’D BE A DEAD MAN,” RUSSELL SAYS.

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egardless of whether or not Russell has grounds for a new petition, his complaints show just how high-stakes the fight for reservation land has become. As reservations have become more restricted, the chief’s role in defending the land and the tribe becomes increasingly politicized. The disagreements over land affect the healthcare, schooling, and employment prospects of hundreds of people, to say nothing of their cultural identity and ancestral land.

“I don’t care about federal recognition. I really don’t. I just want to live here peacefully,” Russell says earnestly. But in the legal web spun around native land rights, there are many more factors at play. As matters of sovereignty become fixed into the law, one man’s desire to stay in his house becomes a problem far beyond the bounds of his gateposts.

The town of Kent has one traffic light and a population of about 3,000. Bruce Adams, who leads the town’s Board of Selectmen, looks out from the sec16

ond floor of the Kent Town Hall. There are a handful of parked cars and a shopping center that has seen better days, but the town has remained as quaint as when he moved there in the 1970s. One of its major tourist attractions is still the nineteenth-century Bull’s Bridge, one of the only covered wooden bridges in Connecticut. “If a casino were built in this town, it would change this town forever,” Adams says.

The tribal members have explicitly stated that, if they received federal recognition, they would be more interested in building gaming facilities in other parts of the state, near larger cities that would bring customers. Adams doubts the Schaghticoke would build a casino in Kent, but the possibility that they would do so is enough to set him on edge. He fears the changes he has seen in the towns around Connecticut’s existing gaming centers: traffic, overcrowding, construction. Even if the tribe just opened a bingo facility or to started to sell tax-free cigarettes and liquor, he worries that they would compromise the town’s New England feel.

As a local social studies teacher for over thirty years, he has taught children from both Kent and the Schaghticoke reservation. Still, Adams speculates that if the tribe were to win all of its land claims, it could hypothetically force the closure of the Kent School, the prestigious boarding school founded in 1906. The Schaghticoke could also tear down the town’s sewage treatment plant, which would cost $9 million to replace. Velky calls Adams’s statements “fear-mongering” unfounded in fact. But reflecting on the relationship between the town and the tribe, Adams says, “It’s become antagonistic for one reason, and one reason only: money.”

The state of Connecticut takes Adams’s side in the debate over federal recognition. The proposal by the BIA to streamline the federal recognition process poses a new threat. The published draft states that third parties would be able to veto petitions from tribes that were formerly denied recognition, which would give the state the right to intervene. But no one knows whether the regulations will be passed in their current form. After a series of public hearings last summer, the tentative plan is still under consideration.

According to the BIA, only seventeen of the 566 federally recognized tribes have made it through the current BIA process under the current regulations since 1978. Most of the others had been approved by Congressional actions. The new rules would require THE NEW JOURNAL

MEMBERS OF THE SCHAGHTICOKE TRIBE POSE IN FRONT OF THE CAMPFIRE ON THEIR RESERVATION. STN CHIEF RICHARD VELKY SITS IN THE CHAIR ON THE LEFT.

the tribe to demonstrate that they have maintained a community with an active political body since 1934, as opposed to “historic times.” This would drastically reduce the amount of paperwork, legal maneuvering, and funding required, especially if the existence of state reservations is considered sufficient proof. Since July 2014, close to 3,000 people submitted testimony about whether the BIA should approve the proposal.

Led by Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, all of the state’s Congressional representatives wrote a letter in opposition to the more lenient requirements.

Governor Dannel P. Malloy wrote his own letter, stating that, for Connecticut, “the consequence would be devastating.”

“When does no mean no? What gives anyone the right to lighten the rules?” Adams asks. He coaches after-school sports, and he likens the situation to an athletic competition: “Remember that game you lost MARCH 2015

back in 2001? We’re changing the rules, and we’re going to give you another try at winning the game.”

Or, in the bleak words he recounts from one of his attorneys, “It’s a little bit like Whack-A-Mole.” Whenever Kent seems to finally be safe, the tribe pops back up.

Adams rejects the notion that communities who have been so thoroughly disenfranchised for centuries deserve reparations: he believes that the time for that has passed. The Oneida Nation lost a land rights case in Sherrill County, New York, several years ago, because the judge ruled that the land had been under different ownership for too many years. And Adams states that the same must be true when looking at what is owed to the Native Americans in Connecticut. The town has already spent $400,000 to fight the Schaghticoke over the last fifteen years, partly through a group called Town Action to Save Kent (TASK).

“There’s no question that wrongs were done to 17

Native Americans way back when,” he says. “But I think we’ve gone too far the other way in trying to make things right.”

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oom 1505 of the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse in New York City is packed with people in suits by the time Richard Velky arrives. Dressed in a baseball cap and jeans, he stands out in the crowd of suited lawyers. He has come to hear the fate of his land be debated at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The case is distinct from a BIA petition for federal recognition, but even he knows that a state-recognized tribe’s chances of winning this case are slim. He is here, in part, on principle. He strolls across the pristine white marble floors, watches the ornate gold-hued doors of the elevator close behind him, and takes a seat near the black wall.

“THERE’S NO QUESTION THAT WRONGS WERE DONE TO NATIVE AMERICANS WAY BACK WHEN,” ADAMS SAYS. “BUT I THINK WE’VE GONE TOO FAR THE OTHER WAY IN TRYING TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT.” The sound of a gavel rings out across the courtroom. “Hear ye, hear ye,” an assistant shouts out, as the judges file in: the Honorable Peter W. Hall, Gerard E. Lynch, and later Richard C. Wesley. Clad in black robes, in a room with elegant dark wood paneling, they too sit surrounded by reams and reams of documents. Video screens around the room project their faces to the audience, alongside the image of the speaker at the podium. When the green light at the podium turns on, the speaker may begin. Each has a little more than ten minutes to state his claims before the timer hits zero and the light turns red.

Benjamin Green, the representative for the Schaghticoke, faces a formidable coalition: the Kent School 18

Corporation, the Town of Kent, the Connecticut Light & Power Company, and the United States of America (collectively referred to as “Defendants” in the brief).

The Preston Mountain Club and several private estate owners are also listed as appellees. Green stands, looks up at the judges, and informs them that the tribal land was sold without U.S. approval. His clients, he indicates, should not be denied the protection of the Indian Nonintercourse Act. “This is another step in what has been more than a decades-long struggle,” says Green. But as he starts to cast doubt once again on the DOI’s decision to deny recognition, Judge Lynch, the snappiest, most fiery of the three justices, cuts him off: “But we’re through all that,” he says, before leaning back in his chair to listen to Green argue that times have changed. Green’s case comes to rest on the tenuous argument that the BIA considers a state reservation to be representative of a political community, at least according to the summary accompanying the proposed BIA rule changes.

The discussion frequently returns to the standard set by Montoya v. United States, the 1901 court case under which a tribe is defined as “a body of Indians of the same or a similar race, united in a community under one leadership or government and inhabiting a particular though sometimes ill-defined territory.”

But the ruling comes from a time when the government’s relationship with tribes was drastically different from what it is now. Another part of the 1901 decision notes: “Owing to the natural infirmities of the Indian character, their fiery tempers, impatience of restraint, their mutual jealousies and animosities, their nomadic habits, and lack of mental training, they have as a rule shown a total want of that cohesive force necessary to the making up of a nation in the ordinary sense of the word.” Despite the clearly outdated attitudes, the court is interested in keeping with precedent.

David Elliott, an attorney for the Kent School, comes to the stand, followed by John Hughes, from the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut. Dick Schell, the friendly, round-faced headmaster of the Kent School, sits on the opposite side of the room from Velky. He has heard this debate rehashed countless times, and he has traveled all the way from Kent for the case, even though he thinks it is extremely unlikely that the claim will go through.

He has been headmaster for thirty-three years at the school, which he himself attended as a boy, and conTHE NEW JOURNAL

cerns about the Schaghticoke’s claim have has always existed. “It’s a long, drawn-out affair,” he says at the end of the presentation of arguments.

The representatives of the defendants stand outside the courtroom congratulating one another for a

ED SARABIA HOLDS A JAR OF AMERICAN SPIRIT TOBACCO AS HE LEADS THE BURIAL CEREMONY.

job well done, and Velky walks past them without a word as he makes his way to the exit. Elliott insists that once the STN loses this case, its land claim is over.

But of course, as rules shift, the matter is never so simple. “If the BIA enacts the proposed regulations, this tribe will go back to the BIA to be recognized and they will be recognized,” Schell tells me, matter-offactly. It is irrelevant to these defendants which of the chiefs triumphs; to them, Velky and Russell are on the same side of the problem. But for now, since the tribe has not met the standards for federal recognition, the defendants have won their case.

MARCH 2015

I

n the fall, back on the Schaghticoke reservation, Bellantoni, the former state archeologist, is placing the bones into a gravesite. Kneeling over a hole dug in the corner of the cemetery, he pulls out femurs, tibias, and smaller fragments from the white tissue in which they are wrapped. Prior to 1990, they would have likely been discarded, or simply covered up, since they were found on the site of what used to be a Native American fort. A sand and gravel company blew up the area in the early 1900s, Yale researchers excavated some of the remains in the 1930s and 1940s, and another construction company brought a bulldozer to sift through the ground about a decade ago. Now, the location is being prepared for condominiums, and Bellantoni has driven the remains across the state so they can settle into the ground on Schaghticoke territory.

“We can’t know they are Schaghticoke, but they are of native descent,” says Velky. It has never been important to him and his tribe to prove the specifics of lineage—that is the concern of the politicians around them. “If they don’t end up here, they’re going to end up in some museum,” he adds.

The Schaghticoke encircle the hole in the corner of the cemetery. One man brings clippings of fresh pine to lay in the grave, and Velky rubs sage from a Ziploc bag between his hands as he stands over the dirt pit. Bellantoni covers the bones with 4,000-yearold flint spearheads that were found at the site and may have been funerary objects. A tribal member adds the rest of the tobacco at the end, and the men begin to cover it up with shovels.

There will be no bulldozer coming to the Schaghticoke cemetery, no matter what the U.S. government decides. At the very least, the tribe’s members know that they have four hundred acres where they can continue to gather. They come on days like this to eat hamburgers around a campfire, or test their guns in preparation for deer-hunting season, or practice rituals that have been sacred for centuries. But people don’t lie quietly, like bones. They turn against one another and speak angrily of how they have suffered.

Maya Averbuch is a junior in Berkeley College. She is the managing editor of the New Journal.

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Everyday Evil CAN A NEW NETWORK OF RADICAL VEGANS CHANGE THE MAINSTREAM LIBERAL AGENDA?

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BY ERIC BOODMAN

he funeral was supposed to begin at 7:30 p.m., but the mourners didn’t show up until closer to 8. They came dressed all in black except for their sneakers.

None of them had been to this kind of funeral before, and they were nervous. “I haven’t memorized my speech,” a young woman named Bianca told me. The procession was going to begin at the New Haven Green. Bianca shuffled around the flagpole, trying to get warm. With nightfall, the mist had turned to cold pinpricks of rain. Another woman asked what would happen if the funeral was interrupted by hecklers.

“If we’re getting heckled, we stay focused, centered, serious,” said Zach Groff. He was officiating the funeral, and he spoke with the gravitas of a priest in the confessional. “If we refuse to leave, they can say, ‘You’re trespassing, we’re going to have you arrested.’

Before they tell us to leave, it’s perfectly legal.”

The mourners had reason to be nervous. Their procession would take them through downtown New Haven and into several restaurants. They would line up beside the tables, amid the din of clinking cutlery and conversation snatched between bites. They had no intention of eating. Quite the opposite: their mission was to eulogize the food.

The funeral was organized by Direct Action Everywhere—DXE, as it is known—a newly formed animal rights network. While DXE opposes all animal cruelty, the primary target of its campaigns is the production and consumption of meat. It considers eating animals to be a serious act of violence. To get their point across, its mem-

MARCH 2015

21 SCREENSHOTS FROM DIRECT ACTION EVERYWHERE’S YOUTUBE CHANNEL

bers stage “actions” in restaurants, shouting at the patrons, reminding them that they are eating corpses.

For many, the image of animal rights activism involves wide-eyed ladies leafleting on the sidewalk.

As Groff puts it, “Animal rights is a white country club activity, has been up until this point.” DXE’s leaders want to take the movement out of the hands of fuddy-duddies and give it a twenty-first century makeover. The network prides itself on its diversity: Groff points out that the national founders of DXE are Chinese American, Indian American, Chicano. Full of words like “normativity” and “intersectionality,” their rhetoric has a certain intellectual hipness, and it is beginning to catch on. A year ago, Groff says, DXE consisted of eight people in San Francisco; now the group has approximately eighty chapters in twenty countries.

The community theater aspect of the funeral—replete with props, costumes, and lines to —is not incidental to the movement’s growth. The primary aim of DXE’s actions is not to convince enthusiastic steak eaters to give up meat. Instead, it is to forge a strong network of activists. Each action is the radical vegan equivalent of an ice cream social: a way for the community, which does 22

a lot of its organizing online, to meet in person and become friends. The public performance is meant to band vegans together, to strengthen their resolve and prevent them from returning to the vegetarian—or worse, omnivorous—fold.

What makes for good bonding can make for bizarre protests. At the funeral on October 30, the mourners on the Green couldn’t decide how confrontational they wanted to be. They would be shouting at restaurantgoers, but they weren’t going to cause any harm. They wanted to be noticed, but they did not want to be arrested. When they walked to Groff’s Honda to get the coffin—a four-foot-long box made of obsolete election signs that Groff had spray-painted black— one of the pallbearers spoke up: “One note about the coffin. Could this be mistaken for some kind of explosive device?”

Groff stopped in the middle of handing out fake flowers. “Good question,” he said. He stuck his nose into a purple bloom, thinking hard. “Good question,” he said again.

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ew Haven’s restaurant scene is nothing out of the or-

dinary: noodle shops, fast-food joints, and pizzerias alongside a smattering of more upscale, professorial places. To the organizers of DXE, though, the banality with which we view these restaurants is a sign of our desensitization. The animals that will become meat are not slaughtered on-site, but in the activists’ eyes, the restaurants that cook and serve cows and chickens and pigs are nothing less than institutional accomplices to murder. The group’s language is unequivocal. As Zach Groff wrote to me in an email before the funeral procession, Chipotle and Buffalo Wild Wings are “places of violence.”

What the rest of us think of as animals, DXE refers to as “nonhuman animals” and as “our brethren.” In their literature, animals are assigned names and genders, personalities and biographies. When I asked one of the pallbearers in Connecticut why she gave up some of her favorite foods, such as pizza and ice cream, even though their creation didn’t entail any slaughter, her answer was very personal: “I wouldn’t want anyone to do that to me: forcibly impregnate me, take my babies away, and take my milk.

I would feel extremely violated by that.”

When it comes to the capacity to feel pain and joy and love, THE NEW JOURNAL

animals are no different from humans, according to DXE. Groff is convinced that animal rights can become the next progressive movement, following in the tradition of civil rights and gay rights. Organizations like ACT UP used violent imagery and street art and disruptive actions to draw the world’s attention to the AIDS crisis. Now, DXE wants to use those same tactics to draw attention to the horrors of the meat industry.

If the members of Connecticut DXE had been nervous before the funeral, it was nothing compared to what I felt. At about 6:45 p.m., I had gone into a state of frenzy.

Nearly everything I was wearing was the product of either murder or theft. My sweaters were made of wool ripped from the bodies of poor bleating sheep. The sounds of pain involved in the production of my leather shoes are simply unprintable. My subjects would take one look at me and know immediately that I was a criminal. And who wants to give good quotes to a murderer?

I borrowed a non-leather belt from a friend. It didn’t keep my pants up, but I figured that exposing my rear end was better than exposing myself as an enemy to the cause. My only nonleather shoes looked like they had MARCH 2015

emerged from the nightmares of Coco Chanel: fluorescent whiteand-blue jogging sneakers made of synthetic mesh. I slipped them on and laced them up. I didn’t have time to find a non-wool sweater, so I made a mental note not to unzip my jacket. I grabbed my notebook, and headed out for my first assignment undercover.

As I walked to meet the activists, I had an uncomfortable realization. The funeral would be filmed and posted on YouTube.

And even if no one I knew clicked on the videos, I would be traipsing around downtown New Haven in a procession that aimed to commemorate the lives and personalities of those creatures who’d been turned into meat—creatures that under almost any other circumstances, I would be happy to ingest. I might not have been a mourner myself, but in my black coat I sure looked like one.

Our first target was Buffalo Wild Wings. There were about fourteen of us, and as we walked in, a hostess in a bright yellow sports jersey said, “Hi, guys, welcome!” and flashed her most professional hostess smile. She didn’t seem to notice our somber faces, our funereal black, our signs, our flowers, or our coffin. We stood between tables, under huge TVs that yam-

mered with the sounds of football games. Allan Brison, a former New Haven alder—whose beard and shining eyes make him look like DXE Connecticut’s resident druid—started off the proceedings by gesturing at the coffin. “Behind us is the body of someone, someone who was never named,” he intoned, “who only wanted safety and love, but only knew suffering and violence.” His voice quavered, barely audible over the music and the sports games. Still, the restaurant’s manager appeared almost immediately, touching Brison on the elbow and whispering in his ear. Brison headed for the door.

As planned, Groff began to shout, with the rest of the mourners responding in unison.

“Their bodies!”

“Not ours!”

“Their milk!”

“Not ours!”

“Their lives!

“Not ours!”

As Groff himself made his way to the door, one of the diners shouted after him, “They’re delicious,” and began to snicker.

“You laugh, they die,” Groff said.

Out on the sidewalk, everyone agreed that as actions go, the one they had just staged was weak.

Everything needed to be louder, 23

the speakers more sure of themselves. Groff would take over the opening speech—his booming baritone would carry better than Brison’s voice.

The next stop was Chipotle. In DXE’s view, Chipotle is the worst of the worst, the most cunning of enemies. The irony is that Chipotle’s website is not so different from DXE’s. Both disparage factory farms, and both claim to be fixing the problem. The burrito chain’s solution is to source meat differently. According to their website, one hundred percent of their pork comes from pigs “raised outside, or in deeply bedded pens,” where they can wander and dig with their snouts, with no antibiotics and a vegetarian diet. Other pages claim that the company has been successful in promoting “naturally raised” cattle, and it chooses poultry farmers who go beyond the FDA requirements. Their menu even has vegan options.

But DXE activists say that Chipotle’s website is full of lies— “humane-washing,” in Groff’s words—and that its revenue is “blood money.” They see Chipotle’s attempt to provide “naturally raised” meat as yet another instance of the corporate machine masking its misdeeds in order to turn a profit, like a fossil fuel executive teaching schoolchildren how to recycle.

Tonight, New Haven’s Chipotle had a surprise on the menu: a funeral. It was just as short lived as the funeral had been in Buffalo Wild Wings, but Chipotle franchises have an antiseptic design, and the bright lights and quieter music made the activists more noticeable. As Groff began to chant, patrons pulled out iPhones and 24

THE NEW JOURNAL

began filming. They may not have gotten to hear the tragic stories of Pumpernickel the rooster, Franklin the pig, or Grace the cow, but they saw the coffin and heard Groff’s message loud and clear before the uniformed manager—who looked no older than 25—held the door open for us. “I’m sorry folks,” he said, his tone neutral. “You have to do that outside. If you’re not going to buy anything, you’ve got to leave. If you’re not outside, I’m going to call the police.” Then, as we trouped out, he added, almost robotically, “Thank you. Have a good night.”

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he last time Allan Brison ate meat was on April 30, 1975. It was the day the Vietnam War ended, and he was hitchhiking across the country, staying in Christian missions. He remembers the meal clearly: chipped beef, the meat thinly sliced and served on toast with a cream sauce—what Brison calls “shit on a shingle.”

He had become interested in vegetarianism through the work of Hebert Shelton, an alternative medicine guru who advocated both vegetarianism and fasting.

Brison’s longest fast lasted twentyone days—he had checked into Shelton’s retreat in Texas—but he began to feel weak, and he soon switched diets, eventually settling on a regimen of low fat, natural foods. “The Okinawans are the healthiest people on earth, and they eat mostly sweet potatoes,” he told me, over popcorn dusted with nutritional yeast.

Brison is 76 years old, and his unusual eating habits have sustained him through a life of poMARCH 2015

litical activism. In the 1960s, you could find him facing off with the police in Civil Rights protests (and, on two occasions, locked up in a Houston jail cell). Fast forward half a century, and Brison was still at it, out-campaigning a well-established Democrat in 2008 to become one of the only Green Party representatives ever to sit on the New Haven Board of Alders. And he remains an enthusiastic protester: the People’s Climate March, Black Lives Matter demonstrations—you name it, Brison is there.

“YOU NEED TO HAVE DRAMATIC ACTIONS AND THEY NEED TO BE CONFRONTATIONAL. AND YOU CAN DO THAT COMPLETELY WITHIN THE LIMITS OF THE LAW. YOU WANT TO SPREAD THE MEME OF ANTI-SPECIESISM AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE.”

But he hadn’t made the connection between his diet and his activism until he met Zach Groff.

While many of the members were already active in the animal rights movement, it was Groff’s organizing and fiery emails that brought DXE Connecticut together.

As a leader of a protest move-

ment, Groff is unusual. He is lowkey, and he does not go in for the kind of oversimplification that makes for good political rhetoric.

He graduated from Yale in 2013 and now works for a New Haven nonprofit that tackles global poverty alleviation. He knows that DXE can seem like a crazy fringe group, and, when I visited his apartment, he was quick to assure me that animal activism had nothing to do with his day job.

I had once again donned my vegan get-up—my pants falling off, my shoes a-glitter—but I needn’t have worried about Groff going on a fire-and-brimstone tirade against leather or wool. “Now that I scream in restaurants, the label ‘angry vegan’ is appropriate,” Groff conceded. “But in my personal encounters I’m a lot more soft-spoken. I’m quite shocked that I’m doing this.” And it turns out that neither leather nor wool is part of DXE’s campaign.

Groff speaks the way you would imagine a Yale grad might: a mile a minute, every sentence packed with quotes and statistics and subtle distinctions. He mentions so many philosophers, economists, and fellow activists that it is hard to keep track of his verbal footnotes. He identifies himself with a philosophical movement called effective altruism. “It’s all these nerdy people who are also bleeding hearts, who want to figure out how to do good,” he said.

Their tool is rationality, and more specifically, utilitarian argument.

Past animal rights campaigns have focused on fur and animal testing. But the number of animals who suffer to make coats and pharmaceuticals is tiny when compared to the number of animals slaugh25

tered for food. I asked about the buzzwords we hear all the time: local, humane, free range, grain fed. “It’s not going to be possible for us to have a society where we raise animals decently in order to kill them to put them on our plates,” he said.

Groff may describe himself as rational and soft-spoken, but our interview happened to fall on election night, and I could see the political firebrand emerge every time he turned to the coverage being streamed from his computer onto the TV in his living room. When Chris Christie appeared, Groff snarled: “He’s totally fine vetoing laws against gestation crates”— criminally small cages into which pigs are packed. “We should just put him in a gestation crate. I’d be happy to eat him if someone served him to me.”

Meanwhile, right-wing pundits have not held back from launching equally biting attacks on DXE. At Bluestem Brasserie, a fancy restaurant in San Francisco, an activist named Kelly Atlas gave a speech last September about the abuse that her “little girl” had suffered—her little girl being a chicken rescued from a factory farm. As Motown-hits played through the restaurant speakers, she looked around the room at the smirks on diners’ faces, and began to cry.

Her heartfelt words were picked up by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, both of whom wasted no time pointing out how absurd the message was. They listed pressing issues that, in their opinion, deserve more attention than the plight of a chicken. And even liberals who love to hate Limbaugh and Beck would have to admit that they have a point: police brutality 26

in Ferguson, New York and the rest of the country is simply more urgent than the pain of farm animals.

Groff, however, views animal liberation as neglected by the very people who ought to support it.

“Animal rights is the orphan of the left,” he said, quoting a blog post by another DXE activist. And though pundits may laugh at outpourings of emotion on behalf of animals, Groff feels that any publicity is good publicity. “You need to have dramatic actions and they need to be confrontational. And

“DID YOU KNOW THAT AT THE FARMS THAT SUPPLY PLACES LIKE WAL-MART, THEY TEAR OFF THE BABY PIGS’ TESTICLES WITHOUT ANY ANESTHESIA?” you can do that completely within the limits of the law. You want to spread the meme of anti-speciesism as quickly as possible.”

A

s the night continued, the protesters’ speeches became more personal, their performances more convincing. In Shake Shack, the staff had a powwow behind the counter, but none of them interrupted the funeral procession.

Suzanne Beck, holding up a

picture of a rooster as if at a vigil, raised her voice and began: “Pumpernickel was a smart and social rooster. He knew his name and understood when his mom told him to go lay down or go eat or go play with the cats. He loved to be held and kissed and was very protective of his mom who took him in when he was a baby. Pumpernickel loved to chat with us and he loved to hear how beautiful he was. He was one of the most social beings I ever knew.”

Then it was Bianca’s turn.

She had no picture of the pig of whom she spoke, but her voice rose with emotion, as if speaking about a dear friend who had narrowly survived a deadly illness: “Franklin is one of the lucky ones.

He is one of my favorite pigs to visit at the animal sanctuary. When he was a five-pound piglet, he was tossed into the dead pile but a concerned neighbor noticed he was still alive. She rescued him and brought him to the sanctuary. When I visit him he comes when you call his name. He loves hugs and cuddling in his hay as he peacefully falls asleep now knowing he will have another day, as all animals should.”

Some customers were smiling, others were filming. All burgers and shakes were left untouched.

“The dairy industry knew her as Number 4391, but to me her name was Grace,” Groff said. He projected without shouting, like someone delivering a soliloquy to a packed theater. “Like you and me, she wanted only love and kindness, but she was used, abused, and then discarded by the dairy industry, impregnated until she ran dry and then thrown out like trash.”

The grand finale was saved for THE NEW JOURNAL

Brison. “We know that violence against innocents is wrong,” he said. He did not speak particularly loudly, but the restaurant had gone silent, and his voice was perfectly audible over the background music. “We stand with heavy hearts to speak for those whose voices were silenced by corporate greed and lies.”

Over the course of the evening, I watched as a loose collective of vegans became a coalition of activists. They began to chant again as they filed out of Shake Shack, no one breaking character. They had not planned to demonstrate in this many restaurants, but now they were so pumped that they couldn’t help themselves. As they passed by restaurants they didn’t intend to enter, they held up their signs as if they were talismans, to keep away the carnivorous evil eye. Someone suggested that we go up the street, to teach Union League a lesson. Union League was big. Union League was The Man. The Union League Café is an upscale restaurant “in a nineteenth-century setting,” as its website states, where ducks and cows are given posthumous French names and wine pairings to match.

We filed up the stairs, and through wood-and-glass doors into the dining room. As the activists began to shout, the polite murmurs of fine dining hushed. A man to my left looked up from his “Selection of Artisanal Cheeses.” A waiter in a black vest paused, his metal crumb-scraper and crumb-dusted plate held demurely at his waist.

Dressed as we were in sneakers and funeral black, with our makeshift coffin held aloft, we hadn’t expected to be let in, but no one interrupted the speeches for a MARCH 2015

while, until the owner emerged.

“You leave this place right now or I go to the police,” he said in a thick French accent. He pointed a fat finger towards the door. “I call the cops because this is not normal.” As we filed back out, he gave Suzanne Beck a little push in the back.

O

n Sunday, December 7, I met up with DXE Connecticut just as they were being escorted out of a mall in Milford by a security guard. When the guard began to warn them about the dangers of animal overpopulation, Suzanne Beck looked him in the eyes and replied, “Did you know that at the farms that supply places like Wal-Mart, they tear off the baby pigs’ testicles without any anesthesia? You should think about that next time you want to eat some bacon.” The guard’s smile faded. He reached for the walkie-talkie at his belt. “I think it’s time for you to go.”

But DXE isn’t going anywhere soon.

In January, DXE unveiled a new campaign. They had kept it secret up until then, Groff says, for fear of “industrial spies.” The group’s national organizers say they jumped the fence of a chicken farm in California that supplies Whole Foods with eggs. On YouTube, you can watch them exploring the pens late at night, sickly chickens illuminated by the beam of their headlamps. In another scene, they take one of these chickens to a vet, who diagnoses a litany of health problems: a cut beak, long-term diarrhea, maggot infestation. The farm’s owner has insisted that the chickens filmed were not his and

that he respects all humane and organic certification requirements.

The New York Times also reported that trimming chicken’s beaks is indeed standard practice to prevent chickens from pecking their pen-mates, which can lead to cannibalism. DXE sees this as a testament to the chickens’ inhumane living situation.

You may be forced to think more closely about those chickens next time you go to Whole Foods.

DXE has been staging protests in stores around the country, holding signs and playing animal sounds from their cell phones. In Connecticut, they have recruited a few Yale students, who have brought along their friends. They are convinced that they are right. It may be relatively easy to dismiss them as crazy vegans—people with whom you couldn’t possibly have a rational conversation—but they will happily inform you that the great majority of moral philosophers are vegetarian or vegan. If you ask, they will lay out their arguments against animal cruelty. If you don’t, they will disrupt your shopping or your dinner anyway, staging funerals and shouting slogans to strengthen a community.

Eric Boodman is a senior in Branford College. He is a co-editor-in-chief of the New Journal.

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snapshot

the yarn bombers A writer searches for radical knitting activists

by Ariel Katz

STEPHANIE MAPLES

T

he yarn hung in purple skeins from the ceilings of small tents. It was wrapped into rainbow spirals inside plastic boxes, and interwoven with bright green feathers and small iridescent sequins. Yarn stared up at me from book covers, from brochures, from multicolored quilts stretched over tables, and from the hands of women clicking knitting needles.

On a Saturday in October, I was at Stitches East, an annual “fiber experience” for knitters, crocheters, spinners, and dyers. The three-day-long event boasted a marketplace, a fashion show, and a full schedule of technique classes. The Hartford Convention Center was quiet, save for the mechanical whir of yarn swifts turning their wooden arms in quick circles. Booths were strung with Christmas lights and decorated with framed photos of alpacas. The crowd was what I expected: largely middle-aged, white, and female. Some wore floor-length Renaissance dresses or skirts decorated with cherries.

But I was there in search of “yarn bombers”:

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craftivists who display their knitting in public spaces in support of certain social and political goals. I learned to knit and cross-stitch at an elementary school where none of the work was graded and teachers went by their first names. Crafting was an opportunity for creative expression, not an exercise in thrift.

But as Joanne Turney writes in The Culture of Knitting, knitting has a history as a “subversive, even devious activity.” It has been used as a tool for environmentalism, Marxism, and feminism. Knitting can reclaim a largely anonymized, mechanized, labor-divided process of production, and revalue objects based on the time and skill spent creating them.

During the summer of 2014, I walked across a bridge over Boston’s Charles River, running my hand over the knit-covered handrail between the city and Cambridge. The yarn art was created in part in an effort to connect different communities after the Boston Marathon bombings. But such public acts of knitting can be even more radical. In 2012, a group called THE NEW JOURNAL

Government Free VJJ organized a campaign to send knit vaginas and uteri to Republican congressmen who had drafted laws restricting women’s reproductive rights. My imagination of the people who knitbombed grew wild. I began to picture them as D.I.Y grrrls in Doc Martens and pixie cuts. Maybe, in communities close to my own, I would find the subversive “craftivists” that Turney describes. Armed with an encyclopedia of third-wave feminism and a pair of old knitting needles, I went looking for knitting circles in New Haven—and nearby—that were unraveling the patriarchy, one stitch at a time.

At Stitches East, however, hot-blooded radicals were hard to find. I spotted a woman holding a tiny green plastic ring in her hands, sewing a lace flower.

She told me her name was Jacqueline Chalmers, and we chatted about what she called “fiberholics” in the “fiber community.” When she said she was part of a Stitch ’n’ Bitch group, she tripped a little over the “bitch” part. (Stitch ’n’ Bitch is a movement created

by Debbie Stoller, who got a doctorate in psychology from Yale, and who has authored a series of pattern

books with modern projects that appeal to a younger audience. Groups of knitters and crocheters who gather in coffee shops or yarn stores to knit together often refer to the event as “Stitch ’n’ Bitch.”)

I questioned whether my preconceptions of radical knitters’ appearances were accurate, even though she was not wearing, say, an eyebrow ring or leather jacket. So I asked her if she’d ever yarn bombed.

Chalmers told me that she and her knitting group sometimes draped blankets over benches in Binghamton, New York, partially as street art and partially as an anonymous donation to the homeless. Another attendee, Sara Bixler, a weaver with red and purple glasses, told me about a recent yarn bomb she contributed to outside of a Quaker retreat center in Pennsylvania. The purpose was to express solidarity with local gay and transgender communities.

Guerilla knitting traces its roots to early 2005, when, on a whim, Texas-based yarn shop owner Magda Sayeg knitted a cozy for her shop’s door handle.

Sayeg formed a group called the Nitta Crew, whose mission, according to an anonymous member known

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as AKrylik, is to make street art a little more warm ducted a similar project in her own neighborhood. For and fuzzy. Sayeg’s project inspired knitters across the past few years, she has coordinated yarn bombs in the world to cover their own surroundings with conjunction with the neighborhood’s annual Art Walk. knit “sweaters,” sometimes for beautification, other As we sat in Manjares, a coffee shop with a view of times with more strident goals. Along with her cus- Edgewood Park and a few yarn-bombed bike racks, tomers, Linda Reis, the owner of Knit New Haven, Maples described the people who would approach yarn bombs New Haven’s Whitney Avenue each year. her as she yarn bombed. They would reminisce Thick mauve yarn wraps around thin gold string on about how their grandmothers used to knit and how a row of street signs and trees. Between two park- they thought it was great she was reviving the pracing meters, she has stitched a red-and-white heart. tice. While we talked, she ran into a few people she Trina Machesney, another local knitter, told me the knew, talking and laughing as she stood by their table. “sweater” she placed on a friend’s tree as a birth- It’s easy to imagine her orchestrating a yarn bomb: day present was probably the first-ever yarn bomb gathering together women—the yarn-bombers who in the Westville neighborhood. She claims the craft have participated in Art Walk were all women—and of knitting is undergoing a modern revival, espe- showing them how to patch together an eight-footcially among American families who had forgotten long scarf from the dozens of squares they have the art. knitted together.

I wanted to learn more The more women I spoke about the importance of knitwith, the more I began to ARMED WITH AN ting for community building, question the idea that knitting ENCYCLOPEDIA so I called Gale Zucker, the circles were bastions of politiConnecticut-based co-author cal action. The knitters I spoke OF THIRD-WAVE of Craft Activism: People, Ideas, to did not consider themselves FEMINISM AND and Projects from the New icons of larger movements. “I A PAIR OF OLD Community of Handmade don’t really attach it to anything and How You Can Join In. Yarn besides personally what I want KNITTING NEEDLES, I bombing can make a statement to do,” Maples told me. This WENT LOOKING FOR in a “passive political way,” attitude could be a product of she explained. the second-wave feminism they KNITTING CIRCLES IN She told me about an event grew up with: as Turney notes, NEW HAVEN—AND she organized in Little Rock, Arin 1970s and 1980s feminist kansas, at a public library. “It’s discourse, knitting was seen “as NEARBY—THAT WERE an urban library, right in the an act of compliance and subUNRAVELING THE center of Little Rock, and we missiveness, and was derided.” started making little things out In third-wave feminism and PATRIARCHY, ONE of old stuff that people brought, beyond, the craft was embraced STITCH AT A TIME. old buttons and threads. We as a way of reclaiming tradiwent outside and yarn bombed tionally “feminine” activities in all the trees and poles and peonew ways ple joined in, in the middle of the city.” It was one of But even if the knitters did not see themselves as her favorite yarn bombing projects. “For those two third-wave feminists, under Zucker’s broad definition hours, you had a really amazing community effort (“Using craft for a reason beyond the simple making going on.” Zucker’s language sometimes seemed too of the thing and working of the materials”) the Westoptimistic, and she was quick to dismiss claims that ville yarn bombers I met were craftivists on a very locraftivism might be largely the hobby of the white cal scale. Machesney spoke about reclaiming the promiddle class. Her project did seem valuable, though, cess of making a product from start to finish, inching in that it temporarily drew different demographics of towards the Marxist theories of knitting that Turney the city into the same public space. discusses in her book. Even when these women are Another Westville knitter, Stephanie Maples, con- not consciously aligning themselves with any particu30

THE NEW JOURNAL

lar ideology, they are participating in a different kind of action, one that celebrates the act of making and being together, in a society where activities like this are rare.

I had sought punks with radical values. Instead I had found mothers caring just as deeply, if not about ideology, then about their neighborhood.

New Haven knitters were invested in their community-based creation. But a small part of me still wondered: where, if not locally, could I find the knitters who were using the craft to tackle capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental destruction? The women I talked to mentioned ravelry.com, what Machesney called “Facebook for knitters,” several times. The day I returned from our interview, I made an account.

Ravelry is a fairly anonymous social network, centered on what we make instead of who we are. Knitters catalog their yarn “stashes,” document their progress on projects, and ask for help with tricky patterns.

Recent forum subject lines include everything from “Smocking Stitch Brimmed Hat (help, please!)” to “Math Question…” to “Crafty Word Game.” But the forums also host discussions about subjects that the knitters I spoke to in person were hesitant to broach.

Threads include “The things we’re too polite to say/ can’t say out loud…” “Please explain radical femi-

nism as charitably as possible?” “Should we dump ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’?” “Islamic feminism” and “Femnants: what are you reading?” Groups like the “Big Issues Debate Group” start threads about Ferguson, Ebola, voter turnout in the United States, and God. The future of political knitting communities seems to be online, an unlikely home for those who harbor some serious nostalgia for Grandma’s handmade hats. But Ravelry also shows me the variety of forms knitting communities can take. I found that today’s yarn-bombing enthusiasts in New Haven aren’t pink-haired activists holding up signs that say “PEACE KNITS.” The seemingly modest goals of Westville knitters can coexist with the sweeping ideals of Turney’s book and the nonstop buzz of Ravelry’s forums. The projects under way in Westville that aspire to bring together neighbors may seem self-contained, but they are part of a larger quilt of movements and crafting groups that continue to adapt, even as they practice a historical craft. The nature of the craft seems to encourage constant revision and restructuring of the communities that support it: after all, yarn can always be unraveled, and the knitter can begin again.

Ariel Katz is a senior in Morse College.

profile

investing in writers The benefactors behind Yale’s popular creative writing writing courses

by Grace Hirshorn

O

ne evening last November, I sat next to Anne Fadiman, sipping red wine and enjoying Mory’s famous Baker’s Soup, as Anne told our table of current and former students her famous “car service story.”

When she first came to Yale to give a Master’s Tea, she invited a Yale graduate to travel with her in the hourand-a-half ride back to her home in Whately, Massachusetts, in order to discuss the craft of editing.

Paul Francis ’77, sponsor of the Francis Writerin-Residence Program, sat at a neighboring table, surrounded by alumni of the writing program that bears his name. Ultimately, it was Francis’s generosMARCH 2015

ity that made the dinner possible, and it was his specific intention of endowing a “pastoral” professor that brought us Anne. So the story goes, when the selection committee learned of Fadiman’s traveling mentorship, they knew immediately that Fadiman would fulfill Francis’s vision.

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ne afternoon last December, I ascended to the thirtieth floor offices of Delphi Financial, overlooking New York City, to sit down with the two 31

sponsors of Yale’s Writer-in-Residence programs. scale of a professorship, he wasn’t certain exactly what Francis happens to be friends with Robert Rosen- form he wanted the gift to take. He did know that kranz ’62, sponsor of the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Resi- he wanted his donation to provide something unique dence program. The two met many years ago by “total and valuable for the university. coincidence,” through the board of New York Uuni“Having thirty-three professors in the economversity Law School. ics department instead of thirty-two didn’t seem Rosenkranz is the CEO of Delphi Financial Group, like it would move the needle very much for Yale,” while Francis has worked in both the private and the Rosenkranz said. public sector, serving as the CFO of Ann Taylor Stores Rosenkranz liked Schmidt’s suggestion of endowCorporation and Priceline.com, and in high-level ad- ing Yale’s first writer-in-residence program, since he ministrative positions under New York Governors El- knew that students got a “certain thrill” from proxiot Spitzer, David Paterson, and Andrew Cuomo. imity to famous writers. That “thrill” was even more Rosenkranz described his philanthropic vision than simply being taught by a great educator. as “venture philanthropy,” approaching Yale with the “No matter how distinguished the professors are, financial means to enact “less obvious” educational there’s a star quality that attracts students,” Roseninitiatives. Rosenkranz’s gifts have enabled the Uni- kranz said. His first “star” was Ved Mehta, a blind, versity to develop new science Indian-born author and New and quantitative reasoning Yorker contributor, who served “PRIVATE FUNDING courses, construct Rosenkranz as Yale’s first Rosenkranz WritMAKES FOR A Hall, and develop its online er-in-Residence from 1990 to learning platform.

1994. In 2004, Dean Richard MORE COMPETITIVE Ultimately, he praised Brodhead appointed poet LouENVIRONMENT, WHERE a system in which priise Glück as Rosenkranz Writvate institutions like Yale er-in-Residence, the same year SCHOOLS HAVE TO and venture philanthropists Fadiman joined the faculty.

COMPETE FOR FUNDING, work together.

Francis’s undergraduate “Private funding makes for experience was marked by the FACULTY, STUDENTS, a more competitive environmentorship of Branford MasAND REPUTATION, AND ment, where schools have to ter and writing teacher William compete for funding, faculty, Zinsser, the author of the classic THAT FOSTERS FREEstudents, and reputation, and guide On Writing Well. FranMARKET COMPETITION, that fosters free-market comcis noted that his undergraduWHICH MAKES THINGS petition, which makes things ate study of writing at Yale had great here,” he said. been a “tremendous asset” in GREAT HERE.” Both men were drawn to his career. So in 2003, Francis donate to Yale out of a sense of approached Yale College Dean allegiance to the University. Rosenkranz graduated Richard Brodhead with the intention of endowing a summa cum laude at the age of 19, as the youngest “pastoral” writer-in-residence—someone who would member of Yale’s class of 1962, and recalls how the provide advice and guidance to talented students, college helped him “cobble together” tuition from just as Zinsser had. There would be funds set aside loans, scholarships, and student jobs. for “Francis Conversations”—readings with promi“I just feel such affection for the place,” Rosen- nent writers. Most importantly, the Francis Writerkranz said. “It was the first time that I’d succeeded in-Resident would engage with students beyond the in what I thought was a big pond and it gave me the classroom. One way Francis has encouraged this is confidence to think I could do something major with through reunion dinners with former students, like my life.” the dinner I attended last fall at Mory’s.

In 1990, when Rosenkranz first approached Yale’s Rosenkranz had not initially intended to limit then-President Benno Schmidt with a $1 million gift his writer-in-residence program to writers of fiction and the intention of establishing something on the and poetry, and would have been “perfectly happy” to 32

THE NEW JOURNAL

sponsor writers of scientific literature or public policy. international human trafficking. Still, she ultimately “You don’t necessarily need to write fiction or echoed Glück’s emphasis on nurturing her students’ poetry, but you had better be able to express yourself creative self-determination. well in writing,” Rosenkranz said.

“I think that writing is free speech, but I don’t Though Rosenkranz did not initially set out to think that my role is to create political writers,” Fadisupport creative writing at Yale, he and the profes- man said. “My goal is to create freedom, true freesors he endows are united by an overarching vision: dom, giving people the skill and pleasure to use writa dedication to teaching—both inside and outside ing for whatever purpose they choose.” the classroom.

At the same time, the writer-in-residence proAs Langdon Hammer, chair of the English De- gram gives the professors, like Fadiman, the freedom partment since 2005, said, the philanthropy of to practice their own craft. This support allows them, Rosenkranz and Francis has enabled the department practitioners of art forms that aren’t necessarily lucrato hire, “in each case, a really extraordinary writer tive on the free market, a certain stability. Glück feels and woman of letters who happens to be an insanely grateful for the teaching profession that enables her committed teacher.” to make a living and create art “without any induceTheir commitment to teaching has earned both ment” of adjusting her work to suit popular taste.

Fadiman and Gluck repeated extensions of their initial “I’m very grateful for teaching, because I’m not writer-in-residence contracts. always writing, and when I’m In 2012, Fadiman received the not writing, I can teach,” Glück Prize for Teaching Excellence by said. “A lot of America’s great“YOU DON’T Non-Ladder Faculty. A glance est poets teach. That’s what they through her class’s reviews by do. Some of them love it, and NECESSARILY NEED students is enough to validate some of them tolerate it. But TO WRITE FICTION the decision of the prize comin the end, it’s how they make mittee. One student claims that their living.”

OR POETRY, BUT the six hours of one-on-one And we students feel lucky YOU HAD BETTER BE meetings with Fadiman were to have the opportunity to work ABLE TO EXPRESS worth the entire Yale tuition. with our literary role models.

Glück’s students also praise “This random guy, giving YOURSELF WELL her teaching attitude and style. all this money, provided me IN WRITING.” “She’ll say to the class, ‘We with serendipitous opportuare all here for the love of this nities to sit down with Louise craft and the love of this disciGlück. It’s sort of unreal,” Marpline, and because of this, we are constantly revising shall said. “I have benefited so much, and I know that.” our poems, and because of this, we are here, engaged I share Marshall’s gratitude. Though the idea of with each other,’ and that’s very much what she be- “businessmen meddling in academia” may sound lieves, and how the class feels,” said Eleanor Marshall, troubling in the abstract, the relationship between a former student of Glück’s. these donors and the writer-in-residence programs And, unlike in other classes with specific cur- is highly successful. These “venture philanthropists” ricula, Glück enjoys creative autonomy in struc- are motivated by loyalty to Yale, and trust Yale’s facturing her courses. “There is no attempt by the ulty to execute their vision. As a graduate of “Writdonor to supervise or affect the range of teach- ing about Oneself,” I have personally benefited ing that goes on on his dollar,” Glück said. She from the intellectual atmosphere cultivated by their offers her students this same opportunity for financial generosity. creative self-determination.

Fadiman admitted feeling a “particular thrill” Grace Hirshorn is a senior when her students use their writing skills to accomin Ezra Stiles College. plish good—citing, for example, Sarah Stillman ’06’s award-winning work for The New Yorker exposing MARCH 2015

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endnote

fun in the time of tolerance How to throw a killer party in 2015.

by Austin Bryniarski

H

ey everyone! You’re getting this email because I want you in my suite this weekend.

I’ve admittedly invited a lot of you, which might mean our chip and pretzel rations will be depleted faster, but it’s important to me that you each understand how much I value your friendship. Please refer to the list of those cc’d, and if you have any unresolved tiffs with those listed, promptly resolve them.

Anyway, we’re calling this a “pre-game,” but by no means feel pressured to have plans for after it. We would call it a “game,” but we wouldn’t want anyone to think they were being rude if he or she were to leave a bit early.

So this is somewhere between the pre- and the game—like, right where the hyphen would go.

But by no means is this going to be a fast function, so maybe it’s more of an em dash? In the case that you’ll stay a while, feel free to pregame this em bash only a little, but we should 34

have plenty of provisions available for buzz sustaining. The master and dean and four parents from the new Party Patrol initiative will be present (better safe than sorry!), so our best advice is to not get sloppy.

You will see in the Paperless Post to follow (theme TBD, but soliciting suggestions) that we have not yet decided on an exact time for next Fridays’s get together. That’s because we want to uphold the democratic process in our festivities. We need your input! Please fill out this Doodle poll before 3 p.m. today so that we know when is best for everyone and can maximize attendance. Check out this Excel spreadsheet we’ve put together, where everyone can sign up to bring a dish to share—we’re all legal adults, and it’s about time we started acting (read: throwing potlucks) like it. And please complete this Survey Monkey with whatever dietary preferences and allergies you may have.

THE NEW JOURNAL

Best allergy will be rewarded with a voucher for one (1) free rice cake. While I have your attention, I’ll also just add a small reminder that our suite has a blanket gluten-free rule, so it’s not necessary to mention that in the survey. We’ll be drinking a whiskey made from quinoa and kombucha to mix. Beer will be a squash lager (non-GMO). Diet Coke, seltzer, and whatever else you BYO will be available, but only so long as you BYO. Do also note that I’ve attached a few PDFs to the end of this email, which we would like you to fill out and bring upon your arrival next Friday.

One of our friends is going to be doing a site reading at this party for an anthropology class, so there’s a human-subjects research waiver to sign for the Institutional Review Board. There’s also a document with some questions about your vaccination history—if you haven’t been vaccinated for measles, mumps, or rubella, please let me know SOONER RATHER THAN LATER so that I can have the appropriate homeopathic serums on hand in case of a breakout. We’ve got plenty of Purell, though. Last but certainly not least, there will be a photographer at the event, but we need your OK and your signature before we post any shots to Facebook, because last semester a girl sued when her employer got an unsavory glimpse of her double-fisting sugar-free mimosas. Net positive, though: we weren’t found liable, the community service hours were memorable, and we’re implementing the “Danielle Rule” from now on—no double-fisting in photographs, nay, at all.

Speaking of social media, the designated hashtag for this event is “#OldCampusRager2015.” Of course, feel free to use your own alternative (“#OldCampusLowKeyHang2015,” or “#OldCampusNoExpectationsNightOut”) if you have one—we don’t want to be at all prescriptive with regards to your experience at the party, and hope you’ll make it whatever feels most comfortable for you! Other things: please say you’re attending on this Facebook event, and click here to join the GroupMe that can be used if you feel at any point that the music is too loud. The Spotify playlist here is customizable and public, so have fun with it, but keep it sans MARCH 2015

anything with a parental advisory. We’re asking that everyone submit three song choices, and at least one of them has to be considered “Contemporary World,” which will ensure engaging conversation about non-Western instruments (new obsession, LOL), among other things. And though I’ve mentioned there will be a photographer, we’re recommending everyone download the latest version of the Camera app on his or her iPhone. High-definition or bust!

Dress code is as follows: tasteful-mocktailearly-evening attire. Nothing garish, nothing too formal, but please try to look put together. We have a few gender-neutral grey frocks up for grabs if you don’t think an appropriate look can be assembled from your wardrobe.

If you’re still unsure of what to wear, feel free to send me an email. I’m happy to grab coffee at any point to discuss—though, know in advance that Mondays and Thursdays aren’t my best, Tuesdays I tend to be pretty busy, and Wednesdays I’m usually in meetings most of the day. That offer goes for any concerns you might have—next week’s function will be your night, and I want to make sure it meets your standards.

Last things last! A list of people you should put into your phone in case of emergency is attached. We will have chargers for 4s and 5s on hand, but we’d recommend that you bring your own in case demand exceeds supply. A generator can supply power in case of blackout (electrical blackout, mind you). You will need to present this email, a printed version of this email, or a hologram of this email to gain entry to the party, and we’ve submitted a list of names and blood types to the Yale security office, so your ID/fingerprick sample should allow you to get into the entryway without a problem.

And finally, remember: you must be 21 to drink in the state of Connecticut, marijuana has not yet been decriminalized, and your presence is a present (but Venmo donations to defray some of the costs are welcomed).

Room A41. Should be fun!

Austin

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